Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

I visited a different type of garden this weekend.  No, not really a Koi Garden type garden, but a grand garden, just the same.  The type of garden that you might take a helicopter to see completely…. 

The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is that type of garden (show) (http://www.tulipfestival.org/).  It goes on every year for the month of April in Mount Vernon and the surrounding areas.  There are fields and fields of colorful Tulips.  It is really quite impressive.  Now Tulips are not the type of flowers that you might normally find in a Koi Garden but colorful they definitely are!  Here are some photos.  Enjoy!!!

 This festival is based on working farms.  These are businesses that sell all these Tulips during the month.  In fact, most of the Tulips have already been harvested.  Therefore put off that helicopter tour 'til next year...

Hibernation is not in the cards!!!

We are in the midst of a mid winter thaw or an early spring.  It really makes no difference which as either way it has a great effect on the Koi Garden.  First it was the Crocuses....  Really gorgeous ones, they are just too early.

Next it was the Cherry trees and their blossoms.

The cherry trees are blooming very early, in fact most are already dropping their petals.  Now even the earliest of the Magnolia trees, the Starlota is already in full bloom. 

 Definitely not your typical Koi Garden in February. 

But there is a negative side to all this great weather.  Pollen counts have risen precariously; and with it come the allergies.   Allergies affect the Koi Garden guy, but I am guessing that the fish don’t suffer from the same malady (at least I have received no requests from the Koi for Benadryl).  But there are some negative aspects of the early warm weather on the Koi Garden.  The pond water that was green most of the year, has never really gotten cold enough, long enough, to kill all the algae and clear up.  Therefore the water has stayed green, maybe even gotten more so instead of a normal winter where the cold water clears up all the algae. 

Checking the water chemical levels is not something I bother to do too often in the winter, but with the spring temperatures and green water, I figure I had better do so.   After checking with the test strips, only the Nitrates appear high.  Since the Nitrites and Ammonia are not high I am less worried about the high Nitrates.  A higher Nitrate indicator essentially means that plants would do well in the water.  Well, Algae is a plant and I already know it is doing really well, too well; hence the problem.  If the rest of the chemicals levels are good, the green water is not a show stopper problem, but what good are fish if you cannot see them???

Hmmmm, Decisions about UV lights will have to be made.  Turn it on too soon for too long and the UV light will kill the algae and cause Ammonia levels to increase to hazardous levels for the fish.  Do nothing and the green water means you cannot see any of your fish.  Decisions, decisions…

The water temperature is now near 50 degrees.  If this is true, I will have to start thinking about feeding the fish as they will no longer be dormant and will be hungry!  Normally these are issues we deal with in April, not late February or early March.  Previous testing indicated to me that the water temperature indicator runs about 5 degree too high.  This means I will hold off feeding the fish for a little longer.   I may even turn on the filter heater if the pond temperature starts fluctuating each day.  

So much for the long dormant winter…..

Photography in the Koi Garden

When I started the Koi Garden blog, I wanted to cover both the intricacies of a Koi Garden and also the art and fun of photographing the Koi Garden.  The format of a blog allows, no requires, many photos, but other than that we have not really done huge amounts of discussion about photos. 

Well, because I got a great holiday present, I will spend this blog focusing (oh, that was good…  read on…) on some photography in the Koi Garden.  I received an used 55mm f2.8 Nikon Micro manual focus lens.  But don’t worry; this was no garage sale special.  This lens was originally made in the mid 80s.  Yes, mid 1980s, as in big hair 80s.  Since that time, the lens world has been taken over by the auto focus, lighter weight, multi purpose zooms.  But try as they might, in my view, the new lenses cannot hold a candle to the great old ones (hmmmm, mixed metaphors?).  And the great thing about Nikon cameras is that the great old lenses work on the new cameras almost like the new ones.  Ok, what is up with that?  Can you imagine a present day Porsche allowing you to pull out the engine and plop in a 1985 engine?  I thought not!!!  But I digress…  The point is in the case of old Nikon manual focus lens, they just don’t make them like they used to.

The nice thing about this lens is the clarity.  It is very clear wide open at f2.8 or f 32.0.  That’s right f32.0.  That means the depth of field (DOF) for this lens is huge.  Things that are normally out of focus can be made in focus with this lens.  See the Heather photo where I take a photo at f2.8.  This results in the smallest DOF possible.  There is only one part of the Heather plant that is in focus.  The rest of the Heather is blurry; very blurry.  Of course, in the photo world, out of focus can be good.  They even have words to qualify the quantity of out of focusness.... Bokeh...

The DOF also allows me to keep the entire series of leaves and buds in focus.  This is an Akebia (silver Akebia, if you must ask) that has popped due to a few days of good weather.  Oh and by the way these leaves are lots less than a inch in length.  That is some magnification! 

When you attach a nice flash, or use the one build in to a D300, you get a striking photo like this. 

The Inside Koi Garden reaches Spring

A few weeks ago I wrote about a way to get an early spring by bringing the Koi Garden inside.  Well, we have some results.

No Seattle has not become warm overnight, but the Inside Koi Garden is showing us some spring.  It doesn’t take too long for the Inside Koi Garden to acclimatize to the warmer weather inside.  They act just like they would in the spring, only for our mid winter benefit.

Enjoy a bit of spring in your winter and imagine how it will be with the snow six inches deep outside....

Bringing the Koi Garden inside

Things can get quite slow in the winter around the Koi Garden.  Well at least it seems so, but maybe that is because we spend so much time in the house and not in the garden….

Either way, the leaves disappear, the plants will slow down, the colors mute, and the weather gets worse.   The days get so short that work starts in the dark and ends in the dark, further reducing the usable garden time.  The longing for the spring increases…  Oh, what to do?  Oh, what to do?

But wait, there is a solution!

Why not bring the Koi Garden indoors?  No, really!  Well, not the entire garden but a miniscule representation of the garden?  Yeah!  No reason why not!!!

You can bring small plants and mosses indoors and place them where you can see them and watch them grow every day of the winter.  Bringing things in during the dead of the winter allows you to experience an early spring.  The plants are tricked by the raised temperature of the house to think that it is time for buds to bloom, for leaves to open, all to your advantage.  These new plants require no more effort than any of the rest of your plants.  Plus for those of you that have followed me into the realm of moss fanaticism, this is a great use of any moss you have cultivating somewhere.

A trip to your local thrift shop or local garden center can yield a plethora of places to hold your miniature gems (I just love using the word plethora).  I use large glass containers to achieve a terrarium effect.  Many have small openings on the top or tops to close them altogether.  This is especially good when you want to create a moist, warm environment.  They can be especially stylish as table arrangements.  And I thought so before I got the latest copy of Sunset magazine….  LOL

For those times when you don’t want a glass enclosure, a small bonsai pot works great to help build a little world to bring the outdoors in.  Remember the rule of threes when placing stuff.  Moss, a little maple tree sapling, and a small, shaped granite stone combine to make a nice, balanced scene. 

Both can be kept in the house year round.  Just be sure to keep them away from the direct sun during the summer.  Until then, enjoy the mini Koi Garden in your house!!!

Brrrr, winter has arrived!

The temperature has dropped for the last week and is staying well under any sane temperature (this AM we woke to a 21 degrees, in Seattle no less). 

But the Koi Garden is ready for winter.   The heater has long been turned off and the temperature has dropped nicely and evenly.  As I have talked about in earlier posts, the heater is used to even the temperature out as it falls to the winter levels.  There are some ponds that stay heated year around so the fish don’t even know that winter has arrived.  I call those ponds San Diego ponds….  But our goal is not to do that.  We like the seasons!  We just want to make the transitions smoother.

I have raked the leaves up to keep them from getting into the pond to foul the water.   I also got all the leaves out of the crushed gravel.  A Zen Garden with dirty gravel will just not do! 

The lilies and irises have been split and cut back in preparation for the cold season.  Cutting them way back allows them to go dormant and focus any new growth on the root structure.

The water has cleared up some as the temperatures dropped so it is almost possible to see to the bottom of the pond.

But most importantly, the pond is covered with the safety cover.  Jumping fish are not a problem this time of year as the fish are mostly sleeping.  But it does keep the leaves out and stops any raccoons, herons or eagles stopping by looking to have a sleeping Koi for breakfast. 

The Koi are sleeping without a worry in the world….

Oh and for all the shoppers who are just starting their search to find that perfect gift for their Koi Garden family and friends, we have moved the Koi Garden Guy’s Holiday gift recommendations to a special carousel at the bottom of this site.  This will be available for the next few weeks to save you the effort of perusing old posts. 

Koi Garden Guy's Holiday Gift List

With the holiday season right around the corner, the Koi Garden Guy has put together a top 10 Koi Garden Holiday Gift List for the Koi Garden fanatic on your shopping list.

10.    Solar Chinese Lanterns.  Minimum three lanterns, but this is one case where you can overdo it.  Unless your garden is huge, don’t use more than five. For wet climates, bring them in during the bad weather season.  Remember, they are solar based, so position them where they get the sun.

9.  Koi Tote Bag.  Carry stuff in style. Since plastic store bags are now passe, why not save the environment while advertising a great hobby?

8.  Indoor/Outdoor Weather station.  This station not only tells you the correct time (probably updated by atomic Gnomes in Colorado), it also tells you temperatures. Both temperatures in your home but also the water temperature of your Koi pond. Not the air outside your window, or near the pond, but the water temperature of the pond! It does so wirelessly, so you can read it from the comfort of your living room.

7.  Bonsai Plant.  No link for this one, but you can find some at your local Japanese Garden Stores.  For those people who live in harsher environments, a Bonsai plant is a great way to enjoy the Koi garden indoors during the winter.  Then when the summer comes around again, you bring the Bonsai outside and place it in a shady section of the Koi Garden.     Voondebaaarrr!

6.  Pond Water Test Strips.  I have talked about these before. They are a great way to keep in touch with all the chemical stuff going on in your pond.  No more liquid chemicals, counting drops.  Dip the strip in the water and compare the colors to a standard attached to the container.  Brilliant!

Next week we will have the final five of Koi Garden Guy's holiday list.

Fall Colors in Seattle Japanese Garden

The Fall color provides a great excuse to see other Japanese Gardens.  And when the weather cooperates, we cannot miss the opportunity.  We have shown the Seattle Japanese Gardens earlier in the spring.  This weekend we went back to see the fall colors.

 Because there is so much to see, this week we will focus on the gardens and not the beautiful inhabitants that live in the pond.  The pond water was not very clear and we had enough trouble reducing the number of beautiful pictures to an amount that we could show on this blog.  In fact, if you want to see more photos of the Japanese Gardens, we have created a Picasa web site to see the complete set of photos.  See the pictures at this web site.  Contact Koi Garden Guy for purchases and prints.  Enjoy!!!!

Photographing Japanese Gardens are one of the only times where an overcast sky is a good thing.  The overcast sky allows for use of a lower exposure and brings the colors into the photo better.  Also this is a public park that gets a lot of mileage with people and their families.   So it might be hard to completely get people free photos.  It might make sense not to even try.  There are lots of nice family shots and the people interactions are very nice. 

The Seattle Japanese Gardens does make special provisions for photographers.  Certain Tuesdays during the best weeks of the year, photographers can have a free run of the gardens, before they are open to the public.  At those times, tripods are allowed.  The cost for these times is 30$ and sign-up is required.  During the normal times, tripods are not allowed.  The legs cause trouble with all the families, etc.  Check the web site for more info.

It’s almost time to fall back, but not into the pond

Just like with clocks, there are some things that must be done each year at the Koi Garden Pond. As the temperatures drop, both in the water and in the air, the plants will start to change color and die back. The water will begin to change as well losing the algae that cause the green color and will eventually become clearer. In addition to the changes inside the pond, the leaves in all the adjoining trees are changing color and will start to fall into the pond.

This is an important time for the pond. The dropping leaves and die back of the pond plants can introduce a lot of biomass into the pond in a short period of time, putting real stress on the Nitrogen cycle. As we talked about in earlier posts, this can really screw up the chemicals of the Koi pond. And one thing you cannot mess with is my chemicals in the pond, not after the work we have done to get them in order…

Face it, cutting back the existing pond plants will just sort of speed up what was going to happen anyway and allows us a way to keep the plants from decaying in the pond. We have already gotten the benefits of the plants, both visually and with respect to pond health. It only goes downhill from here… at least till next spring. Trimming the pond plants back also allows me access to any gardening and repotting needs. Lilies are notorious for outgrowing their pots. They are also a very easy plant to break up and split into multiple pots. And as any aficionado of Japanese gardens knows, you cannot ever have enough lilies…

Once we have cut all the pond plants back and or done any required repotting, we can place them back in the pond. They go dormant and will do just fine in the water during the winter. Now we can place the pond cover over the pond. This will not only keep the falling leaves out of the pond, but also keep any Koi-hungry predators from getting at the Koi.

At this time, it could also make sense to do a partial water change. This gives the pond a bump start in cleaning up the water. As the water temperature drops, the algae that makes up the green water, will start to die back. By manually reducing the algae, we are reducing the possibility that large amounts of dying algae will cause a spike in Ammonia and we have already talked about the evils of Ammonia and the Nitrogen cycle… The water is also very high in nutrients. So reserve it for your favorite plants!

Out & About in the Koi Garden Neighborhood

Keeping Koi is a popular hobby in Seattle.

Many people keep Koi ponds, some of them hidden, throughout the neighborhoods. There are probably countless people keeping Koi in aquariums as well. Those hobbyists will also probably end up having a small pond in the future as their Koi outgrow their glass enclosures.

Up until now, I have shown many photos of the Koi Garden. However, in the future I intend to show other ponds as well, both private and public. Some will be formal, public Japanese Gardens, while others will be personal ponds. This is one of those.

This pond, which belongs to my neighbor Miss M., is an older pond, with some beautiful boulders, rocks and older, established plantings. Maples, pines and ferns can all be seen in the picture below.

You’ll also notice that the water is perfectly clear and it is so without a filter system. That is one of the signs of a well designed pond. For this pond, it is probably due to the larger size and fewer fish in addition to the substantial shade, inhibiting the green water growth.

One of the beautiful features of this garden is the graceful bridge, a common element of more traditional Japanese gardens.

And of course, no pond tour is complete without at least one picture of its inhabitants. And these lucky fish will have lots of room to grow in the years ahead.

I hope you enjoyed seeing Miss M’s garden as much I do.

Can't keep a good moss down

Seattle is not known for sunny weather, but the summers are actually quite dry here. Keeping a moss nice and moist and green, much less alive in the summer requires some thinking, in addition to some timing and working with the weather!!! The rains just have returned and are helping out but even in Seattle, you cannot count on the rains.

I have always been impressed with the moist moss in Japanese gardens. I will dive into the Seattle Japanese Garden more in future posts, so stay tuned for them.

In order to cover one of my nicest Japanese lanterns with moss, first I needed some moss. I had read of ways to grow moss from scratch (yes, I do read stuff like that), but that seemed too long a process. It involved chopping up moss in a food processor and mixing it with milk or yogurt to create a paint for surfaces where you want to grow moss. Nope, not going to happen....

Instead I became a moss thief; yes a moss thief. I “harvested” some really nice moss from the sidewalk down the street. I prefer early mornings; it stops having to do the explanations to neighbors…. I used a metal spatula to remove the moss and a cookie tray to store it. The cookie tray works well in retaining the water, keeping the moss moist and healthy. You can almost not over water the moss at this stage. I would recommend storing the resultant “moss cookies” in a shady place in the yard out of sight from your neighbors… For some reason being a moss farmer is not looked on with the esteem that I think it should be…

My goal was to use my moss cookies to cover my Japanese lantern. I first let the moss settle in for a few days in my moss tray. I later pulled pieces out of my moss tray and pieced them together like a puzzle on the top of the lantern in the most natural layout I could think of. I tried to keep the lantern moist and out of direct sunlight for as long as I could. Babying the moss at this time is needed but a Japanese lantern without the top looks, well, looks nothing like a Japanese lantern… So even though I placed it back in the Koi Garden and made sure it stayed moist and in the shade, especially on hot days.

Now once I had spent so much time and effort in covering my Japanese lantern with a delightful head of moss, I had to keep it that way. In addition to the risk of moss drying out, you need to watch out for birds and squirrels. For some reason, they both think that there is something underneath and will sometimes tear up your work in search of gold or something. This is another reason why I always keep some moss in my moss tray. You just never know when you will need some more moss!

After a while, the moss will adhere to the lantern top and you will be the proud owner of a moss topped Japanese lantern. Once the moss is established, it will handle droughts, ice and snow equally well. It goes dormant in the cold of winter, and if dried out in the summer, it will return after some beneficial watering.

Now that is some really good moss!!!

Competition with the Koi Garden

Can’t hold a good bloom back

Despite Seattle’s best wishes, warmer weather was bound to happen, and it has.
With the cold winter and delayed warmer weather, it was pushed off for a while. But when the warmer weather came, even for a weekend, the flowers and leaves take the opportunity to pop. And pop they do.

In the Koi Garden, we have two Maples, a nice smaller lace leaf, and a beautiful coral bark maple. A few weeks ago, both had leaves were just a bunch of small buds, but now they are open and beautiful.

There is also a weeping cherry on the south side of the Koi Garden that has popped. Photographing Cherries are a game of chance in Seattle. Because the entire branches of the Cherries don’t bloom at the same time, one strong rain can knock the flowers off the branches. I took these flowers a few hours before the next downpour occurred.

For these photos, I have moved the F Stop as far down as possible, and kept the background far away. This leads to the out of focus feel and nice bokeh of the background. The depth of field is really only a few millimeters with these photos. I have also switched the auto focus off to allow me to focus on the exact part of the leaf that I want to.

Expect to spend some trial shots as any breeze will move these enough to loose the focus.
With digital cameras, this is no issue, and, in fact should be part of your technique. Just take a lot more photos and expect to spend more time culling out focus and unacceptable photos.

Popping in the Spring

The Koi Garden makes use of a lot of plants associated with Japanese gardens. Cherry trees, Maples and Heathers are all part of the mix. I especially like the lace leaf and dwarf varieties of the Maples. Also the Coral Bark Maple is especially striking. The red bark seems to get more intense when the winter is a cold one. We also have a section exclusively of Roses, including some ground cover roses. For the vertical spaces, we have a few varieties of Akebia (Deep Purple, Purple Rose and Silver Bells). I have been told that putting multiple varieties of Akebia together allows for them to generate sweet fruit that can be used for Jams. I will try to focus on each of those as they start coming into their fancy time. This early in the season, we have some pretty Pieris. Look for some close up of the nice bells.

I am also trying to learn about and try some varieties of Bonsai plants. Look for some write ups about those efforts in the future.

This shot is a picture of the buds on a Weeping Cherry we have on the border of the garden. I am expecting some really nice shots of these in the upcoming days as this Cherry blooms.

The Flowering Pieris provide a nice close up opportunity. I have used a low F Stop for a shorter field of vision. This blurs the background of anything only a few feet behind the subject. This technique is great for photography in city gardens and especially fun when you want to highlight small things these delicate bells.

Mediterranean Heather provides a nice purple pop of color at the ground level. Due to the frost damage this winter, we have culled some of the plants that had problems with the freezing temperatures. This has allowed us to add more of these beauties. Again, move the F Stop down and have some fun with the blurred backgrounds.

This shot is of a Coral Barked Maple. It is about 7 or 8 feet tall but still in a larger pot we have located near the Koi pond. We hope to get a few more years of life of this tree in a larger pot. If we move to another place, we can bring this tree along with us. If not, we will have to rearrange the Koi Garden to find a place for this favorite. This particular variety has some gorgeous, delicate leaves that I will highlight in future sessions.